WHAT’S THE BEST PRESIDENT, A PUGNATIOUS PENGUIN OR CUDDLY PUSSYCAT?
You must be well adapted to harsh conditions to call the southern-most continent your year-round home.
It’s sort of like that in the topsy-turvy continent called the District of Columbia.
There, it seems helpful to be well adapted to climb steep snowbanks each day, dodge ice picks hurled at you from all directions and tolerate transitory temperatures from freezing one day to sunny the next.
In a democracy sometimes stalled and snowbound, at times overheated and perspiring, the question is whether it’s better to have a strong or weak leader?
While there are good reasons to want strong, decisive leaders, there are also intermittent dangers.
Strong leaders whom many of us admire, sometimes can be emboldened to overstep what is our underlying supreme gameplan for running our unique and beloved enterprise, The United States of America. It’s called our Constitution.
Also, mixing strong and wrong is a deadly cocktail like tough-talking Florida Governor DeSantis opposing facemask mandates in public schools, while his state has become the country’s COVID epicenter.
On the flip side, a vacillating, docile, squeamish leader is a prescription for disaster and despair. Weak leaders risk losing our position as the world’s leading nation, a living, thriving example of why liberty and justice for all is the right, and true, roadmap, the best prescription for governing and enduring whatever we face.
So, what’s best, a strong or weak leader? A pugnacious penguin or pussycat? An irascible conservative or obsequious liberal? Let’s say what’s best is a S T R E A K leader who combines the best of strong with a tweak of weak.
Strong enough to stay on a tough, now once again deadly course as long as it’s working, but weak enough to see it’s better to change course when it’s not. Thankfully, the U.S. has awakened from that 20-year nightmare in that quagmire Afghanistan. To the last minute, it’s still costing the lives of our brave troops, God bless them, during an astonishingly swift and massive rescue of over 100,000 of our loyal friends and fellow countrymen from that Islamic maelstrom.
Overly strong leaders have difficulty first seeing, then admitting mistakes.
Weak ones are always afraid of making blunders in the first place so maybe in this volatile and precarious nuclear age, a little fear might be in order.
Once we find the right balance in our leaders between strong and weak, let’s not forget about something else called term limits
They would cure what President Truman said were the two worst legislative diseases, senility and seniority. Or as Mark Twain once said, politicians are like diapers that need to be changed often.
I thank certified financial planner and Fiduciary Nancy Hite for reminding me of these latter two memorable quotes and my brilliant wife Rita for encouraging me to always balance strength with kindness and a bit of wisdom wouldn’t hurt.
Besides an inveterate blogger, Tom Madden is an author of countless published articles and five books, including his latest, WORDSHINE MAN, available this summer on Amazon. He is the founder and CEO of TransMedia Group, an award-winning public relations firm serving clients worldwide since 1981 and has conducted remarkably successful media campaigns and crisis management for America’s largest companies and organizations.
